How to use Conversion Data to Crush your 2020 Sales Goals

Now that we’re all off and rolling on our sales goals for the year, it’s a great time to visit our goals and specifically how to track progress towards them. Here at FranchiseHelp, we don’t do anything without data, so let’s take a look at how to use data to understand and reach your goals.

Understand and Evaluate Your Objectives

The first and most important step is to know what your goals are and be able to quantify them. As a franchisor, you may want to sell more franchises for less money, but in order to track progress towards your goals, you have to quantify them first. Ask yourself two key questions:

1. How many franchises do you need to sell?
2. How much money are you willing to spend to do it?

With your goal explicitly stated, you can now identify what it takes to get there. The next round of questions to ask are:

1. How many Discovery Days do you need to have for each sale?
2. How many Applications? How many Qualified Prospects? How many Inquiries? 

If there’s something else that’s more important to your particular sales funnel, use that instead. Whichever metrics you choose, make sure they all contribute to your stated goal.

Create a Reasonable Benchmark

Using your historical data you can set a realistic baseline for your expected conversion rates at each stage, and from there it’s simple to scale it up to the total you’ll need to reach your goal.

For instance, if you know you need 10 applications per sale, and you want 50 sales, that’s a total of 500 applications. Do this calculation for all the key stages in your funnel, and save it somewhere to compare against!

In order for all of this to be useful, you’ll need to track these key stages for all new leads that enter your funnel. Make sure everyone on your sales team knows what they need to track, and that your CRM makes it easy for them to do so. (Check out our previous post on the IFPG’s Franchise Sales CRM to learn more about how profitable franchisors are using CRMs to get more leads.)

Set Up Sales in 2020 For Success

Remember that even in the best case scenario, the majority of your leads will eventually end up as “dead” leads regardless of how far they got in the funnel. For your data to be meaningful, you’ll need to track not only a lead’s current status, but the farthest status it reached. Otherwise, you’ll end up with thousands of leads marked “dead” and a few marked “sold”, and no idea how you did in the middle.

Here’s our recommendation. Every week, take a look at your pipeline and how many leads have made it to each status. How do your actual numbers compare to the goals and baseline conversion rates you set above?

If you see any issues start to arise, you should now be able to pinpoint the source of the trouble and resolve it, so you can get back on track to crushing your goals.

Anna Flowers is the President of FranchiseHelp. At any given time, she has at least six Excel Spreadsheets open across three screens.